Opinion may be harshly (and indeed prematurely) divided on the actual usefulness or originality but at least we can agree that it's pretty.

Right?

The point I was making was this: if crowd sourced funding eventually gets a bad name through Mr and Mrs average losing their investments to crowd funded projects then it's bad for all crowd sourced enterprises - be they artistic and worthy or unashamedly commercial.

Yes Kickstarter works really well now but if that now that same model has been given the green-light for essentially unregulated commercial activity (if you read the El Reg link I sent) then where does that leave all crowd funded projects?

Between this and the above it might signal the end of the road for this form of funding. Lots more people are probably going to get burned. I backed the MARIE music robots after reading about them on Slashdot. It gave me a good feeling plus the promise of stuff sent to me in the post was a nice thing to have. I eventually got the stuff out of the blue, over a year later, and was very pleased to receive it having pretty much given up on it. When kickstarter works - it works well as in this case. One thing that projects should do is at least try to keep their backers in the loop. However we can only hope that the JOBS act isn't going to give this type of investment/funding a bad name.

Oh wait..

..just go the whole hog and stick data centres on both poles? Plenty of cool stuff to melt, plenty of sunlight for both halves of the year.

A future-proof storage medium.

..so that you can tell people what you had for your breakfast. And then show them.

The SEP field.

Ritchie, your slim book; and a headful of pointers; to yet more pointers.

Arf.

So what's worse - your default space radiation or some enriched nuclear fuel lying around or able to find its way inside your systems? One you know you have to deal with - the other you potentially have to deal with and it's way messier and much less predictable.